What to Watch at the Movies

Nimbly written by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Widows is like Ocean’s 8 for smart people, a heist movie about a gang of widows whose robber husbands died in a $5 million heist they must now complete (or be killed by the mob that wants that $5 million). It's got the girl-power mojo of Ocean's 8 and a far more pulse-pounding and brilliantly photographed thriller plot, and it's also about Chicago's corrupt political gangs at war, both white and black. Liam Neeson, 66, is great as the robber husband of Viola Davis, 53, who takes over after he's lost in the fatal first-scene shootout, and Robert Duvall, 87, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya are superb as criminals with political gifts. But this movie is all about Davis' crew (Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki and Michelle Rodriguez), who swiftly master the heist trade. Adapted from a 1991 British series by the maker of Prime Suspect, which made Helen Mirren a midlife star, it will make Davis a bigger star than ever. —Tim Appelo (T.A.)

Also New in Theaters

Lord of the Rings’ Viggo Mortensen, 60, gained 30 pounds to play Tony Lip, the Mafia nightclub bouncer who was a bodyguard, chauffeur and lifelong friend of piano genius Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali, 44) on his perilous concert tour of the South in 1962 — when black visitors were wise to carry The Negro Motorist Green Book to locate places where they’d be safe-ish. It’s a true story and a heartwarming Oscar magnet. No surprise Ali is tops, but who knew Viggo could play Italian American mob comedy? Or that director Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber) could direct a smart, only partly funny, socially conscious drama perfect for our times? —T.A. FULL REVIEW

This brooding, beautiful movie about Vincent Van Gogh has the best possible director and star: Julian Schnabel, 67, a famous painter who became an even better, infinitely deeper filmmaker (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), andWillem Dafoe, 63 (Spider-Man, The Florida Project), nominated for three Oscars and a 2018 AARP Movies for Grownups award, as everybody's favorite mad, one-eared Impressionist genius. The cinematography by Benoît Delhomme, 57 (The Theory of Everything), is absolutely rapturous. Oscar Isaac is wonderful as Van Gogh's confidant, painter Paul Gauguin, but the film is mostly a death-defying plunge into the heart and soul of Van Gogh — you get to see the world through eyes that saw what nobody else did, in order to paint masterpieces comprehensible only to people not yet born. The script has many soaring moments, but the narrative falls short of the acting and directing. Still, it's the best Van Gogh biopic ever, and among the most artful films about an artist. —T.A. SEE DAFOE TRANSFORM HIS LOOK INTO CHARACTER

Still in Theaters

Courtesy Netflix

It's Orson Welles week on Netflix: The debut of his long-gestating final film "The Other Side of the Wind," which he left unfinished upon his death in 1985, and "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead," a behind-the-scenes documentary about its tumultous production.

Orson Welles' last movie, The Other Side of the Wind, begun in 1961 and now posthumously edited for release in theaters and on Netflix, started as a film about Ernest Hemingway's suicide, morphed in 1970 into one about an aging, legendary wild-man director (based on Welles, played by John Huston) and a rivalrous young director (Peter Bogdanovich, now 79), and was shelved unfinished for decades. It's fascinating and often beautiful, but its plot will baffle you unless you watch the far better documentary about it, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (also on Netflix), by probable 2019 doc Oscar winner Morgan Neville (Won't You Be My Neighbor?). It reveals that Wind is a satire of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's lovely, senseless art film Zabriskie Point, shot by a cinematographer who also shot softcore porn and Ed Wood flicks — both of which Wind resembles — and a coded autobiography. Welles, jealous of Bogdanovich's Oscar-nominated success for films like The Last Picture Show, cast a waitress resembling Bogdanovich's girlfriend Cybill Shepherd as Bogdanovich's character's girlfriend, then had Huston's Welles character steal her. A win for the AARP audience, and a window into Welles' hall-of-mirrors mind. Wind has bravura scenes and vivid characters (like Susan Strasberg playing a version of Welles-hating critic Pauline Kael), but the script, partly written by Welles mistress and Wind costar Olga "Oja Kodar" Palinkas, is a dim, incoherent parody of inscrutable European art cinema. Her big sex scene, though, is Welles' last cinematic masterpiece. —T.A.

Gary Hart would’ve been elected president in 1988, but his dalliance with model Donna Rice nuked his career and changed U.S. history. Hugh Jackman, 50, plays Hart as a guy whose heart is a distant mystery, creating a void at the center of the film (which makes it less popular than it deserves). But his chilliness is brilliant, and around him whirls a dazzling, Altmanesque cast of characters. Vera Farmiga is superb as Hart’s wronged wife, but the best performance belongs to Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, 63 (Whiplash), as Hart’s smart campaign director, incredulous about his boss’s cluelessness. An important movie about issues that resonate in 2018. —T.A.FULL REVIEW

This biopic glorifying and sanitizing Queen is a pleasant enough parade of champion hits and behind-the-music cliches. Rami Malek captures lead singer Freddie Mercury’s polymorphously perverse magnetism, and he didn’t need those prosthetic buck teeth (which people falsely call the secret of Mercury’s distinctive sound — voice scientist Christian Herbst’s 2016 study proved it’s actually his oddly irregular vibrato). Even the true parts of the film seem as fake as those teeth. Mary Austin, whom Mercury called his common-law wife, really did stay in his life (though not bed) after he confessed to being gay, and he willed her about $50 million (versus less than a million for Jim Hutton, whom he called his husband). Mary was likely the “mama mia” who has to let him go in his coded coming-out anthem “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But fine actors Lucy Boynton and Aaron McCusker can’t make Mary and Jim feel real in this infinitely artificial screenplay, and the Queen guys are all ciphers, too. —T.A. FIVE MORE MOVIES NAMED FOR POP SONGS

Shooting his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary Cartel Land, director Matthew Heineman almost got himself killed in a shootout with meth-crazed Mexican gangsters. So he’s the right director for this gripping film about war reporter Marie Colvin, who lost an eye covering Sri Lankan rebels and died in Syria in 2012 while proving its dictator was mass-murdering civilians. Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) is explosively good as Colvin, a two-fisted drinker, adrenaline junkie and moral crusader who always wore La Perla lingerie so even her corpse would be glamorous. Frequent Scorsese and Tarantino cinematographer Bob Richardson injects the savage realism he gave Platoon, and the people who play survivors are actual relatives of war-zone victims. Their tears are real, and they want their stories told. —T.A.

Focus Features

Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe are parents who send their son to a gay conversion camp in "Boy Erased."

Director Joel Edgerton (Star Wars' Owen Lars) directs himself as the ruthless director of a boot camp that tries to terrorize gay youths straight in an adaptation of Garrard Conley's memoir about "ex-gay conversion therapy." As the therapist's victim, skyrocketing young star Lucas Hedges is solid, as is Russell Crowe, 54, playing his kind yet uncomprehending Baptist minister dad, but they're outdone by Nicole Kidman, 51, as the patient's mom. A flamboyant, flashily dressed and coiffed Arkansan, she's rooted in religious traditionalism, yet torn by loyalty to her son and a dawning realization that the therapy is quackery. Really, the film is about her coming of age as a grownup. —T.A. FULL REVIEW

Bleecker Street

Blythe Danner (left) and Hilary Swank play a mother and daughter facing the former's Alzheimer's disease in "What They Had."

Writer/director Elizabeth Chomko makes a stellar debut with a story inspired by the effect her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s had on her family. Blythe Danner, 75, who studied films of Chomko’s grandmother, accurately captures the symptoms of the illness, and also the vivid personality that persists despite dementia. Double Oscar winner Hilary Swank and Michael Shannon are utterly believable as her children, battling over their mom’s care, and with her caregiver, their dad (the brilliant Robert Forster, 77). The best movie about dementia ever, because it’s really about a family we can relate to, and with much more healing laughter than you’d expect, along with serious tears. A Terms of Endearment for our time. —T.A.

Recent AARP cover subject Melissa McCarthy, 48, is Oscar-buzzed for her performance as the actual celebrity biographer Lee Israel, whose books stopped selling, so she started forging and selling letters from Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward (400 of them, so cleverly conceived she got away with it for a while). Her character is outrageous, sometimes nasty, way too preoccupied with cats and alcohol, yet still somehow charming. But even better is Richard E. Grant, 61, as her shady bar buddy. A brilliant, bitter comedy and a classic New York story. —Thelma Adams (T.M.A.)FULL REVIEW

Francois Duhamel/Amazon Studios

Timothée Chalamet (left) plays a son battling addiction and Steve Carrell is his strugglig father in "Beautiful Boy"

Based on memoirs by David Sheff and his recovering addict son, writer Nic Sheff, Beautiful Boy is an acting duel between Steve Carell, 56, and Timothée Chalamet as the troubled son — and the audience wins. The film takes us from Nic’s dazzlingly promising youth to the ghastly day when David must coldly refuse Nic’s desperately sweaty request for money. You wince at the flashback of late-teenage Nic talking David into sharing a joint — hey, he’s a Rolling Stone writer — unaware that it’s a spark for tragic dynamite. Maura Tierney, 53, is winning as Nic’s stepmom (and Amy Ryan, 50, is an Oscar maybe as his mom), but Carell’s performance, tightly wound but powerfully emotive at moments of crisis, is the news here, a banked fire of helpless rage facing a child blazing out of control. The soundtrack (Nirvana, John Lennon, Bowie) is the year’s best, a greatest-hits collection of genius addicts’ tunes. —T.A.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga play Jackson and Ally in 'A Star Is Born.'

Lady Gaga and star-director-writer Bradley Cooper will clean up at the Oscars for their electrifying update of the famous story of an unknown talent who becomes a singing star, while her alcoholic mentor (Cooper) flames out. The first hour is a sensational skyrocket ascent — who knew Gaga could act and Cooper could sing? Or what she looks like with her real hair and face? The final hour and 15 minutes are slightly less superb, but still better than the 1976 hit Barbra Streisand version. Sam Elliott, 74, as Cooper’s brother-manager-rival, and Andrew Dice Clay, 61, as Gaga’s papa deserve best supporting actor nominations. —T.A. FULL REVIEW

Onetime Sundance Kid Robert Redford, 82, returns to crime with style as Forrest Tucker, an actual bank robber who staged one last crime spree at 76 after his 18th jailbreak. Natty, polite and violence-averse, Tucker is irresistibly appealing to the people he robs — and even to the young detective (Casey Affleck) on his trail. As the love interest Tucker picks up on the road while on the run from cops, Sissy Spacek, 68, is less fact-based but equally charming. This may or may not be Redford’s last movie, and it’s better than his 2013 can-I-get-an-Oscar solo sailing disaster epic All Is Lost, partly thanks to its deep bench of grownup talent, including Danny Glover, 72, and Tom Waits, 68, as Tucker’s partners in crime. They call them “the Over-the-Hill Gang,” but these actors are all still in the game, and winning. —T.M.AFULL REVIEW

GRAEME HUNTER PICTURES

In 'The Wife,' Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce play a long-married couple at a crossroads in their relationship.

Jonathan Pryce and Glenn Close, both 71, brilliantly depict the four-decade marriage of a womanizing novelist and his more talented, totally overlooked wife. Close gives a career-capping performance as a great writer sidelined by wifely duties, poised to explode as her husband prepares to accept the Nobel Prize in literature. No living actor has been nominated for an Oscar more often than Close without winning. The studio released The Wife this year instead of last, avoiding competition with Frances McDormand, who won for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This could be Close's year. —T.A. FULL REVIEW

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